I’ve played a good few rounds of Battlefield 6‘s new Redsec battle royale mode, which launched as a semi-surprise earlier this week, and you know what? It’s alright. Decent bordering on pretty good, in fact.
Battlefield’s always been one of the better fits for battle royale – certainly more so than the twitchy, near-stealthless gunplay and limited vehicles of Call of Duty and, on paper at least, even the original, wafty third-person shooting of non-battle-royale Fortnite. Which inadvertently proves the real point here, in a way. The ‘on paper’ fit for a mode like this is rarely a decent indicator of a game’s potential for success.
With Battlefield 6 it’s complicated. The theory is this series, which is built for tactical squad play, voice communication, land and air vehicles and complementary classes, should translate quite brilliantly to battle royale. I’m yet to get a solid squad of four reliable teammates together for a full-sized game so far, which is where I suspect the most magic really happens, so this all comes with a hefty caveat – though, as always, that comes with the caveat that everything’s more fun with friends. But in duos, while the concept isn’t half bad, there is a sense this one is always going to feel a little flat.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on why. The pitch, again, is pretty good here. There’s an intriguing in-game levelling mechanic, for instance, where gathering ‘intel’ and fulfilling periodic mini-missions gives you XP, which you use to get better perks. There are weapon upgrades, which let you up a weapon’s rarity level by adding a few attachments to it at once. There are tanks, which you can unlock by fulfilling multi-step missions to earn a key card, which you take to a big truck and wait, precariously, for its ramp to slowly lower as your grand reward is revealed. There are attack helicopters you can just hop into and fly about!
All of these provide a steady flow of almost-emergent gameplay, which is where a lot of battle royales tend to sing. Upon slowly lining up two separate satellites, for instance (friend and colleague-slash-resident-team-carry Will Judd did most of the heavy lifting here really), and then making it to an arbitrary third location where our reward appeared, we finally secured the requisite key card to go claim a tank. I mashed the card into the slot, stood back as the ramp slowly, slowly descended, the storm (instantly lethal here, in an interesting genre twist) edging dangerously close, I then got dutifully shot to bits. The same happened the first time we made it to a chopper, after a desperate scramble away from an earlier one-sided encounter: a smarter and more worldly duo were sat watching it, waiting for some buffoon to take the obvious bait.
This is all good stuff, so why the faint praise? Well, for one there’s a sense this is all a little too familiar, a bit too close to what we’ve had before. Redsec feels particularly close to Warzone – not helped, in its defence, by the fact Warzone technically pilfered the armoured chest plates idea from Battlefield’s first battle royale, Firestorm. The colour-coded gun rarities, signalling the number and quality of attachments; the air strikes and UAV perks; the obvious modern-military vibe and the shapeless greyness of its map, which stitches together non-sequitur sub areas (a golf course down the road from a missile silo, anyone?). That’s all very Warzone, even if, again, Battlefield and CoD are ultimately two ever-closer sides of the same coin these days. The respawn system, where you can re-drop a squadmate at a designated tower, is right out of Apex Legends. There are nuggets of newness here, and the specific combination is new too of course, but I’m not sure it ever quite feels new as a whole, nor truly, specifically Battlefield as a result.
But that, really, is only part of it – and arguably not that big a problem in itself. This is a magpie genre, after all, borne of and entirely sustained by pinching and borrowing. What’s nagging at me instead is that battle royales such as this have been trending a certain way for a while, and that way is one which slightly misses the point. Specifically, they’ve been getting busier. Redsec, like Warzone and so many others, is riddled with things to do.
Again, a good thing on paper. It’s clear this is a design choice, in all of these games, and one that comes from the school of perpetual engagement. Missions arrive regularly and multiple times over the course of a match. These regularly bring you into contact with other players right away, grabbing you by the nose and drawing you around the map to specific waypoints. The map itself is quite densely built-up, with a constant flow of buildings to investigate, chests to open, glowing, jingling items to collect (at one point my squadmate remarked that he couldn’t hear the footsteps of the enemy who downed me over the noise of all the loot nearby). There’s a sense of constant progress, constant incentivisation and reward. It is, in a way, the philosophy of engagement from the UI – battle passes, levelling up, the unlocks after unlocks that spout off like carnival fireworks after every half-arsed multiplayer match where your squad came second-last – ported over into the actual game design itself.
It compares starkly with PUBG, the game I inevitably compare all battle royales to, rightly or wrongly, after many years of cycling between them. It’s perhaps an unfair comparison – these games shoot for different crowds and often have different goals entirely – but also I think a necessary one. Goals can and should be evaluated as much as the way games try to meet them. The comparison here comes back to an old distinction I’ve made some time before, though forget where, and let’s be honest almost definitely didn’t make before someone else: between intrinsic and extrinsic reward. Extrinsic being the kind where games motivate you with carrots and sticks separate to the act of playing itself. Unlocks, upgrades, XP, the general sense of achievement from completing a daily mission or sub-objective within a match. Battle pass stuff and everything that comes with it, in other words.
Intrinsic reward comes, if you’ll forgive the cheesiness, from within the game itself. You keep playing it because the playing itself is fun, not because it has some extra things attached that exploit psychological tendencies well enough to make you feel accomplished or satisfied. Take the in-game missions and the PUBG comparison. The missions are designed to, first, always have something to do, which is in a way antithetical to the core of battle royales which are, in part, about the moments between combat, the lulls that make the action even more potent. The silence that makes a sudden encounter with a lurking enemy into one of video games’ most powerful jump-scares.
They’re also designed to engineer risk-and-reward moments, where you weigh up making a break for an item despite it being off your original path to the centre of the circle. In a battle royale with intrinsic reward you don’t need that: I’m weighing up whether to loot one more house already, just because I feel a little unsatisfied with my gear, because I’m feeling greedy, because I’m feeling a little dangerous today. And I’m often getting punished for it with a foolish, haphazard race against the closing circle after looting for too long, exposing myself to a sniper in a dash across an open field or making a load of noise with a car.
There are points where Redsec – and this is really only partially about Redsec now, it’s also Warzone, Fortnite, Apex and the rest for me – still touches on this. The closing circle is an all-timer of a design conceit after all, and so in only a handful of games yesterday I still found myself in one mad dash across the open, peppered with DMR fire from a nearby hill as I prayed (in vain) that the firestorm would catch them before their pot-shots caught me. But here these moments almost feel like an afterthought, saved for the last few, as we were, who made it to the very end where the actual battle royale-ness starts to matter again.
And that’s really the crux of it. The modern battle royale, a lot like the modern video game at large, is over-cluttered, overencumbered with activities, incentives, mechanics, systems, rewards. Part of that is down to its nature as one of the original ‘hangout’ games, where players spent ever longer hours together simply chatting, catching up after school. But that also means its magpie nature has overwhelmed it in a way; we’ve kept adding and adding, without thinking to stop and occasionally take away. What you lose, from all that addition, is the purity of a genre that was originally, and I feel should always be, about the extraordinary tension of survival against the odds, the shift from prey to predator and prey again, the genius simplicity of its design. This genre is about life or death, after all. You can’t make that more exciting.
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